"Edson’s vivid portrayal of the urban area, as well as the working class and underclass, creates a vision of Saint John that highlights the discrepancy between the pre-modern idyllic notion of life in Atlantic Canada and the more complicated reality of the region."

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The Dirty Milkman (2005)

Back cover blurb:

Most Canadian writing has to do with the concerns of the middle class. Jerrod Edson isn’t like that at all. Charlie White is a milkman. He became a milkman after he failed to make it as a writer. He drinks too much and the world he lives in is harsh and ugly, sad and crude. By chance he meets a hooker named Prin. With her, he re-examines what he was and what he has become. With her there are brief moments of beauty and hope, which suggest that perhaps she’ll prove capable of redeeming him. Perhaps she will and perhaps she won’t—the question is never asked and never answered. Jerrod Edson writes with a raw energy that makes for uncomfortable reading, but the very roughness of his prose gives it clarity and the ring of truth. This is his second novel.